I have a couple of posts that I want to make. It might be a busy weekend between writing midterm comments and airing my thoughts here. I promised to report back on my grand experiment with lagging HW. Now that we are three weeks into the term I think that I have some meaningful observations.
My first observation is that I need to find some meaningful way to regularly incorporate HW so that my students feel that it is a meaningful exercise. I think I am making strides by writing problem sets that reflect my book and our class conversations. I think that I have written problem sets that strike a decent balance between practice and challenge problems. I have been making class space for conversations about the current topics and trying to create some space for simple practice and check-in with some entrance slips. However, it is becoming pretty apparent to me that too many of my students are not in the habit of doing their HW on a daily basis. When we check in on HW at the beginning of class there are plenty of empty desktops and too much silence. It also seems clear to me that these are old habits and the reason I say that is that MANY of the problems they are struggling with now are related to writing line equations. Since we are juggling perpendicular bisectors of triangles, altitudes of triangles, medians of triangles, and angle bisectors it is kind of essential to be able to work with line equations. I know that these are skills that they have had and have displayed, but if the practice was not put in originally, those skills do not settle in and stick very well. I am reluctant to grade HW for a number of reasons. If all I am doing is checking for completion, then I feel I will be often rewarding sloppy and incorrect work and possibly helping some bad habits settle in. If I collect and grade it based on correctness I fear that I will be encouraging students to take some dishonest shortcuts. Instead, I am trying to use the entrance/exit slip idea to encourage attention during class with the hopes that that attention and the reminders of the skills necessary through the entrance/exit slips will (a) make the HW easier when it rolls around about three days after the class discussion and (b) allow me (and my students) to realize what they do or do not know.
My second observation is that this idea of HW lagging behind instruction will take some time for my students to get used to. They have been SO accustomed to trying their hand at something as soon as they begin to think about it and this new pace feels very different to them. I think that the old habits are working against them as they have expressed more confusion on some of the problem sets than I saw last year when I was using these HW assignments and assigning them the night that we introduced ideas in class. This, again. is something I need to address. I need to figure out how to help coach my kiddos to be able to deal with this process. I am too convinced that this is the right way to do this. Reading about it, thinking about it, I am sure that this is the right thing to do. My first time checking in on their progress right now (on this quiz on Tuesday) was a bit of a disaster. There were a number of scores hovering around 50% and for each of those students I returned the quiz with a practice assignment on writing line equations. I am trying to be positive and emphasizing that they know how to do this. I am convinced that this is true but I saw SO many mistakes on the quiz that it was a bit disheartening.
Conclusions? As I mentioned, I am convinced that this is a good way to weave in review, encourage reflection, and try to embed knowledge more deeply. I just need to figure out how to help coach my students so that they can realize the growth that I want to see for them.